- CarlCX
- Dec 14, 2003
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quote:
CARL'S FIGHT BREAKDOWNS, EPISODE 26: THE REMATCH PROPHECY
PRELIMS 3:00 PM PST/6:00 PM EST VIA ESPN+ | MAIN CARD 7:00 PM PST/10:00 PM EST VIA PAY-PER-VIEW
With a weird amount of anti-hype, we're here. We're running back last year's biggest upset and crowning a maybe-maybe-not interim championship and seeing if Derrick Lewis has one more run in the tank and figuring out, once and for all, how Hamdy vs Fedor would've gone.
i once again reiterate i need to figure out how to make my own graphics
MAIN EVENT: LIGHTNING STRIKING AN EMPTY FIELD
 WOMEN'S BANTAMWEIGHT: Julianna Peña (11-4, Champion) vs Amanda Nunes (21-5, #1)
Despite being one of the biggest stories in mixed martial arts in the last year and the rare case of everyone unanimously demanding an immediate rematch, and despite having an entire season of prestige television show The Ultimate Fighter dedicated to it, we've finally arrived at the moment of truth and it feels somehow anti-hyped, and I think I'm writing this today to help myself figure out why.
Some part of it may be Julianna Peña. To say there was very little hope for Peña beating Nunes would be an understatement: She was a +700 underdog going into the fight and her winning by submission was given +1600 odds. This might seem oddly low for a someone with her record, but the unfortunate truth is, Peña had never really done anything to impress anyone. Until the Nunes fight, in fact, there was only one fighter Peña had defeated who was still employed by the UFC, and that was Sara McMann, the woman Peña defeated to get her title shot, who had one victory in the four years prior. Before that, she was most famous for giving lifelong kickboxer and non-grappler Germaine de Randamie her one and only victory by submission.
She didn't really have a great rise or a great fall. She won The Ultimate Fighter 18, and then she scraped by, got taken out by Valentina Shevchenko, left the sport for two and a half years to have a child, came back, and after one win against the aforementioned McMann she got her title shot because there was no one else left to do it. She wasn't a hard puncher, she was a grinding wrestler more than a killer, and her grappling, while solid, had earned her more UFC submission losses than wins.
Meanwhile, over that same period of time Amanda Nunes was, of course, killing loving everybody. There's a constant need to compare champions of the past and present in mixed martial arts--could Kamaru Usman have outwrestled Georges St-Pierre, how would mythical prime BJ Penn have done against Charles Oliveira--as an attempt at establishing the ever-moving parameters of quality, trying to discern how the sport has evolved or devolved, and, of course, wondering if your quiet inner feeling that everything was better when you were young and hip was actually correct. GOAT debates are, of course, inherently impossible. That's the fun of them. Outside of truly extenuating circumstances, there's no way to definitively state who the greatest in a given class is.
But Amanda Nunes had extenuating circumstances: Women's MMA, at least in the mainstream, was so young that all five of its women's champions were still active. And that meant she could loving crush them. Over a seven-year undefeated streak she destroyed every woman to ever hold UFC gold across both the 135 and 145-pound weight classes. Cris Cyborg, the second-greatest women's featherweight of all time, has a 26-2 (1) record that spans five major MMA organizations and seventeen undefeated years with the sole exception of Amanda Nunes, who punched her out in fifty seconds. Her power, her aggression and her versatility as a grappler put her miles ahead of virtually everyone she fought.
No one believed in Julianna Peña. And then the championship fight started, and Amanda Nunes dropped her twice, nearly submitted her and seemed well on her way to another slaughter before she came out in the second round charging in headfirst, getting repeatedly cracked in the mouth, and ultimately getting her championship choked out of her. Julianna Peña shocked the world and beat the greatest of all time, and that means she's now the universally acclaimed best in the world with everyone's respect and belief.
Oh, wait, sorry, I googled it. She's still a +250 underdog.
Here's the thing: People don't want Julianna Peña to win. She doesn't have the Cinderella story of a Randy Couture or Michael Bisping who toiled and won fanbases and beat back unstoppable odds to have an unexpected moment in the sun. People don't really like her. She was never particularly memorable, she never established herself as an enormously worthwhile contender, and after winning her title she used her newfound fame to earn fan goodwill by demeaning Amanda Nunes for not being a 'real' mother, going on Joe Rogan to talk about how COVID is a fake globalist money grab, and complaining about cancel culture when people said she was a jerk.
People already felt like her victory was a mistake. The betting lines reflect the consciousness of the MMA world: No one's asking how she won, they're asking how Nunes lost. The safe assumption across the near-entirety of the fanbase sees Nunes crushing Peña and regaining her crown, cementing the fight as a GSP/Serra fluke to be corrected in the timeline.
I don't think they're wrong, exactly, but here's the thing--I also don't think GSP/Serra was a fluke. I think great fighters are just fully capable of losing to good ones, especially when that good fighter happens to be one capable of exploiting their weaknesses.
Julianna Peña is, stylistically, a tough match for Amanda Nunes. She's got a solid chin with great recovery, which makes her particularly difficult as a victim for Nunes' knockout power, and she's a solid wrestler and grappler, which makes Nunes' life as a physicality-over-technique wrestler much harder. Discussions about if COVID had ruined Nunes' lungs or something, but I think the reality is more obvious: After her effortless success in the first round she got cocky, walked right into Peña's style of fight, and paid dearly.
And I think a big part of the equation in this fight no one seems to be talking about is preparation. Julianna Peña trains out of Sikjitsu, alongside such luminaries as Michael Chiesa and good ol' Fancypants himself Lyle Beerbohm, but it's still a camp. Amanda Nunes, in response to her loss, left megacamp American Top Team in favor of starting her own, self-managed camp, the Lioness Studio, which appears to be a cage and some mats inside of a long hallway. And as I said earlier this month about her wife Nuna Nunes:
Past Carl posted:
On one hand, greater focus and freedom in which coaches you personally bring in is a big plus, and Nina's still working with a bunch of her old ATT buddies in her off-time. On the other hand, leaving for a smaller pond camp is a never-fight-a-land-war-in-Asia level of common MMA career killers.
On paper, Amanda Nunes should win this fight. She even showed how she could fairly easily do it the first time around. But she still lost that fight--and that was before she got another year older, and before she had to face an opponent who knows for a fact that she can beat her, and before she chose to leave the camp that guided her to the apex of her career in favor of an empty building full of her own fight posters. She lost that fight before she had more working against her than she has at any other point in her career.
And only now, at this point, do I understand the anti-hype for the match. After the 1,194 words that led to this conclusion, after all the examination, we are, still, talking about how Amanda Nunes could lose this fight rather than how Julianna Peña could win it.
I wouldn't be stunned if Peña won again, but even now, I see that as a factor of the decisions Nunes has made rather than a reflection of Peña's skills. Maybe that's unfair. Maybe Peña looks even better than before and maybe Nunes looks like she has one foot out the door. Maybe the MMA world is losing itself in the monolithic nature of Amanda's career and we're all about to face reality.
But all I can do is write what my brain tells me. And my brain tells me that first round is a predictor for what the second fight will look like. Amanda Nunes gets a TKO. And we get a trilogy fight in December.
CO-MAIN EVENT: ONLY MAYBE AN INTERIM CHAMPIONSHIP
FLYWEIGHT: Brandon Moreno (19-6-2, #1) vs Kai Kara-France (24-9 (1), #2)
Oh, boy. To talk about this fight we're gonna have to talk about things that aren't this fight.
Both of these fighters entered the UFC through the same back door: Maybe the last good season of The Ultimate Fighter, 2016's Tournament of Champions. Then-flyweight champion Demetrious Johnson had so thoroughly smashed his division that the UFC turned his dominance into one of its most oddly ambitious attempts at a talent search, a TUF season made out of goddamn near every single flyweight champion the world of mixed martial arts had to offer, from Shooto to Titan to Tachi Palace (RIP to the kings). Brandon "The Assassin Baby" was the four-time champion of Arizona's World Fighting Federation, a long-running organization that put on dozens of events and fielded talents that are still making waves today. Kai Kara-France was the champion of Australia's K-OZ ENTERTAINMENT: BRAGGING RIGHTS, which, uh, put on seven events over the course of almost four years and folded for good immediately after the night he won its belt.
Also, Moreno's championship fight was his 10-3 record against an 0-0 guy making his debut who never fought again and Kai's was against a 10-7 guy who retired afterward, came out of retirement five years later, got knocked out in one minute by a 0-0 rookie and immediately re-retired.
Yeah. Regional fighting, man. What're you gonna do.
But champions are champions, and both of these promising future best-in-the-world candidates happily cruised onto The Ultimate Fighter, where they were, uh, both fairly effortlessly taken out by Alexandre Pantoja and promptly forgotten about. Moreno got picked up, but was cut in 2018 after going 3-2 and getting beaten by Pantoja for a second time. Kara-France wasn't even offered that level of dignity: The UFC decided against signing him altogether, and he went back home and didn't get signed until (three weeks before) 2019, after a training partner of his named Israel Adesanya happened to hit it big.
So it's 2018, and neither guy is in the UFC, and then it's 2022, and they're the #1 and #2 flyweights in the world and they're fighting each other for a championship that doesn't and may never include the current champion. How the hell did we get here?
Well, Brandon Moreno's time outside the UFC lasted exactly one fight. He was booked in a match for the Legacy Fighting Alliance's flyweight title, won, and was immediately re-signed to the UFC. His aggressive striking and wrestling attacks got him off to a three-fight winning streak in short order, and with it, a shot at the impossibly violent Deiveson Figueiredo. With his reach, his power and his absolutely vicious chokes, most of the world had Figueiredo pegged not just as the winner, but as the man who would be champion for a very long time. And he might have been, and stayed that way, had he not kicked Moreno in the junk.
A timely point deduction led to a draw and a mandatory rematch six months later. Moreno had impressed people in the first fight by defying expectations and staying competitive all night, but having still essentially lost, he was an understandable underdog. It was, thus, a massive upset when he didn't just beat but controlled Figueiredo in the rematch, dropping him several times and choking him out in the third round. It was a great moment, and it demanded another rematch, six more months down the line. The result was a fight of the year candidate that was very, very close, but ended in a unanimous decision for Figueiredo, returning the belt to his waist. The UFC, eying money, declared that as the series was now wholly tied up--one win, one loss, one draw between the men--there would be an unprecedented fourth match to put an end to the rivalry once and for all, coincidentally to be held in Mexico, where Moreno's status as the first Mexican champion would probably make them a lot of money.
While this drama was playing out, Kai Kara-France was having a rough loving time. He joined the UFC in December of 2018 and had a series of tight, grindingly close fights, but his attempts at reaching the top kept getting stymied--including, once, by Brandon Moreno himself. His hands were heavy, but he loved the brawling just a bit too much for his own good and found himself getting repeatedly outwrestled and outgrappled. After a 2020 submission loss to top contender Brandon Royval, the future looked more than a little murky for Kai--flyweight is one of the hardest divisions to stay afloat in, and gatekeepers don't tend to last long once they've been ensconced in the role.
Two things changed. For one: Kai, unmistakably, busted his rear end. He tightened his game, he improved his wrestling both offensive and especially defensive, and in becoming less vulnerable to grappling he was able to utilize his fast and devastatingly powerful striking against his opponents. For two: He got some real loving fortuitous matchmaking. Rogério Bontorin, a well-regarded top ten fighter coming off his first loss in the UFC, got matched with Kara-France and became the first demonstration of his knockout power. Instead of following this with another proven contender, the UFC, seeing the chance for a slugfest, booked Kai against Cody Garbrandt, a big star and former bantamweight champion--who, after being knocked out three times, was making his flyweight debut against the division's biggest puncher.
Kai destroyed him, and in destroying maybe his least qualified opponent in the UFC became one of its most-talked about flyweights. A truly impressive victory over the undefeated Askar Askarov showcased his fully matured skillset, entrenched him as a top flyweight, and set him up as the undisputed top contender to the winner of the Figueiredo/Moreno quadrilogy.
And then, like so many unnecessarily extended trilogies--did we really need a fourth 3 Ninjas--the fourth fight fizzled. First they couldn't agree on a date, then there were disputes over pay, and then Figueiredo thought one of Moreno's cornermen was a racist and he refused to fight anyone but Kara-France, and then he needed hand surgery and decided to scrap the fight altogether. Even more interestingly, upon hearing that the UFC was making Moreno/Kara-France an interim championship match, Figueiredo began talking about promotional disrespect and how he maybe just doesn't want to loving bother cutting to flyweight anymore, and might leave the division altogether and head to 135.
And so we have an interim championship bout between the #1 and #2 in the division, and normally it'd be weird to have them fighting when they just fought a couple years ago, but we almost had four consecutive Moreno/Figueiredo matches in 18 months so does that really matter anymore, and it's for an interim title but the primary champion might be giving up the belt anyway, and also if Kara-France wins they'll be 1-1 against each other so we'll have to talk about loving trilogies all over again.
Flyweight's an amazing division, but boy, it's a loving mess. Brandon Moreno wins by decision. Their first fight was a banger and this shouldn't be different, but the other side of that is I'm not sure it'll, y'know, be different. Moreno's still an aggressive match as both a striker and wrestler for Kai, and he's still got a chin made of stone, and his offensive output has only improved. Kai's going to make him work like hell for it, but I think Brandon's versatility will help him disarm Kai's best tactics again.
MAIN CARD: I AM CURIOUS (BLACK BEAST)
HEAVYWEIGHT: Derrick Lewis (26-9 (1), #5) vs Sergei Pavlovich (15-1, #11)
I'm not sure what you do with Derrick Lewis now, and I'm not sure Derrick Lewis knows what to do with Derrick Lewis now.
Lewis is the most-loved heavyweight of the modern era--maybe any era, honestly--to never get the belt. He's been knocking out UFC heavyweights for nearly a decade at this point, and is such an institution of the sport that talking about him feels almost superfluous. He's one of the most powerful punchers in the history of mixed martial arts, he's charismatic and durable, he's the realization of Quinton Jackson's "just stand up" answer to countergrappling, and he's scarily capable of abruptly nuking people when he seems to be out of a fight.
And he just can't get on top of the mountain. Lewis has been a consistent top ten at heavyweight for years, he's been in multiple title eliminators and had two separate shots at the title itself, and he just can't beat the top. It's not simply that he loses to the best: It's that he gets trounced. Elite-level competition just appears forever past him. This is what makes his last fight so notable: His knockout loss to Tai Tuivasa marks the first time since 2015--twenty fights ago--that he was defeated by someone who was not a world champion. What's worse: Where all of those previous losses came from an inability to adjust to an elite fighter's level, Tai Tuivasa got in Derrick Lewis's face, brawled with him, and won. For the first time in his career, Derrick Lewis lost a Derrick Lewis fight.
Shamil Abdurakhimov, in the meantime, is trying to hit the afterburners on his return to prominence. Abdhurakhimov was one of the more interesting prospects in the division back in 2019, an ex-military Combat Sambo specialist with a nigh-undefeated record marred solely by a loss to Alistair Overeem and two bounce-back first-round knockout victories predicated on not just his striking power but his deeply impressive sense of timing, and his rise, right alongside prospects like Ciryl Gane, Tom Aspinall and even Tanner Boser, had people excited about the future of the heavyweight division.
And I mention those three specific fighters because he was supposed to fight all of them, and instead sat on the shelf for two and a half years of his prime thanks to injuries, visa issues and the pandemic. He wouldn't make it into the cage again until this past March, where questions about ring rust were answered in yet another first-round knockout over Shamil Abdurakhimov. Pavlovich clearly doesn't want to waste any more time reclaiming his position in the top ten; he's taken one of the most dangerous matchups possible to make it happen.
It's difficult not to read this fight as a referendum on the state of Derrick Lewis. On paper, I think Lewis is a bad matchup for Sergei. He's powerful and dangerous and 84" of reach is an awful loving lot, but Lewis has punched his way through disadvantages on dozens of occasions and his chin has stood up to harder strikers, and Pavlovich's talent for well-timed blitzes plays into Lewis's own murderous power and speed. Many men have fallen trying to implement his gameplan, and a knockout loss to Tai Tuivasa, one of the toughest brawlers in the sport, is by no means disqualifying.
But I cannot help worrying that it might be a canary in a coal mine. Derrick Lewis has taken heaps of punishment in his career, he already retired and un-retired once, he turned 37 this year, and the division around him is only getting stiffer. The way he was outfought and outsped by Tuivasa, the way Chris Daukaus was landing those darting flurries before Lewis caught him--those are the things that make me wonder just how well Pavlovich's offense could work.
Heavyweight is a game of inches, but it's also a game of hunches. I have an unfortunate hunch we're finally hitting the end of the Black Beast road. Sergei Pavlovich wins by TKO and we all get a little sad.
FLYWEIGHT: Alexandre Pantoja (24-5, #4) vs Alex Perez (24-6, #6)
This fight is as great as it is a lost cause.
Alexandre Pantoja is a fantastic grappler. He can strike--he's actually got a really solid body kick he uses almost like a jab and it's been a problem for a lot of his opponents, and the fear of his grappling lets him get away with some wild punches sometimes--but his best work happens on the floor. He outgrappled Ulka Sasaki, he outgrappled Manel Kape, he outgrappled Brandon Moreno (twice!). He's an extremely, extremely dangerous submission wrestler, and his failures come almost universally from fighters who can force him out of his kind of fight.
Here's the trouble: Alex Perez is, also, a dangerous-rear end grappler. He's not quite as adroit at scrambling, but he makes up for it with an absolutely crushing top game. Whether he's running the pipe on a single or just sprawling and turning around on people trying to escape his punches, he folds people on the ground, pressures them horribly and aggressively pursues chances to use his chokes. And he, too, is confident enough in his grappling to get away with unexpected things on the feet--such as, say, fighting one of the most experienced grapplers in flyweight history, Jussier Formiga, and being so thoroughly unafraid of his wrestling that he was able to kick his leg to pieces.
It's an amazing matchup! I'd love to see it! It's not gonna happen. Let me present to you the Tapology listing for the last two years in the career of Alex Perez:
The gods will not let an Alex Perez fight happen. Pantoja's bus will break down on the way from the hotel and he will be abducted by a militia group. Perez's cornermen will develop a heretofore unknown version of airborne polio that forces them to be quarantined in one of the secret black sites where the Dallas Sportatorium used to be. Should both men enter the cage and thus illegally cross the holy seal, the entire arena will crack in half and everyone inside will plummet into the abyss.
The fight is a grand dream we are not allowed to see, lest it burn out our eyes.
But if it happens, Alexandre Pantoja by decision.
LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Anthony Smith (36-16, #5) vs Magomed Ankalaev (17-1, #4)
Anthony Smith is still a top five light-heavyweight and I don't know how to accept that. The middling middleweight with multiple losses to welterweights decided to rejuvenate his career by jumping to 205, and he's been top ten for the last six years thanks to it. His skills are better suited to the division; he doesn't have the knockout power or superwrestling that tends to define its top ranks, but he's got a great gas tank, he's very good at mixing his attacks and keeping people guessing, and most importantly, he's durable to the point that it's as much a benefit as a detriment--it's cool to be able to outlast anyone in the division without dropping, but when you are quite literally giving your own teeth to the referee for safekeeping because Glover Teixeira won't stop punching them out of your skull, you should probably pretend to lose consciousness on the grounds that your masochist brain won't do it for you.
Magomed Ankalaev is kind of a throwback--not in that he's an old-school stylist, but in that he's the sort of Thales Leites, Sean Sherk type the UFC begrudgingly allows to climb the ranks based solely on their stubborn refusal to stop grinding people out all while hoping some fan-friendly superbrawler will destroy them before management has to give them a title shot. Ankalaev is not only on the longest winning streak in the light-heavyweight division, he's on the only real winning streak in the division. Jiří Procházka got his shot after two fights. Glover got his after five. Magomed Ankalaev has won eight. But he's a grinder who fights the kind of slow, strategic fights that used to make commentators talk about how booing fans just didn't appreciate the nuances of the sport, and that means they will make him fight every god damned person in the division before he gets a shot. If he beats Smith, expect him to fight Glover. If he beats Glover, well, Aleksandar Rakić will probably be healed up by then, let them figure it out while we tease the light-heavyweight champion of the world fighting Kamaru loving Usman.
Promotion sucks. Magomed Ankalaev wins a decision. He's too stifling to let Smith get his volume game going and he's too good a grappler for Smith's jiu-jitsu to get involved. It's going to go all three rounds, it's going to be an obvious but unexciting decision, and you will enjoy it or you will not be allowed to eat dessert.
PRELIMS: FUGITT ABOUT IT
WELTERWEIGHT: Alex Morono (21-7 (1)) vs Matthew Semelsberger (10-3)
Alex Morono has been in the UFC for six years and has fifteen UFC fights. I bet you don't know if I'm lying to you right now. I could say anything. Alex Morono has fought multiple world title contenders. In twenty-eight career bouts he has never recorded back to back losses. He's co-main evented fight nights and gotten billing over people like Dustin Poirier, Deiveson Figueiredo and Neil Magny. MMAmath can prove, with just four hops, that he is better than Anderson Silva. Seconds after knocking out Cowboy Cerrone, he recorded a mid-octagon video for mega-popular youtube show Good Mythical Morning.
All of these things are true. None of them mean anything. The UFC has never put an erg of marketing behind Alex Morono, nor do they feel the need to. He's an incredible solid, long-tenured fighter and as an obsessive acolyte of this sport if you put a gun to my head and asked me to name his highlight reel, I would mumble something about Cowboy and ask you to be quick. And the worst part is--he tries, man. Alex Morono will literally sprint at people and wing haymakers at them in a desperate attempt to destroy them. He brawls, he sprawls, he throws ground and pound, he tries to get chokes. He wants to be marketable.
Matt Semelsberger is marketable. He's a big, goofy dude with an incredibly goofy nickname--it's Semi the Jedi--and enough power to have two fifteen-second knockouts in the UFC. He's quick in scrambles, he's extremely durable, he'll engage in the kind of insane brawls Dana White desperately wants every fighter to choose, and he'll happily get punched in the head dozens of times by professional athletes for $26k guaranteed.
Slightly older UFC fans might remember a guy named Mike Pierce. He was an unsung hero of the welterweight division, an exceedingly tough wrestleboxer who beat everyone who wasn't one of the absolute best, right up to the point where Rousimar Palhares tore his leg in half. He was the UFC's ideal gatekeeper, and they very gladly threw terrible matchups at him because his value, to them, was as a measuring stick for fighters they were considering getting invested in.
Alex Morono has been with the UFC for a long time. They know who he is. They have no particular intentions of getting him into the title picture. He's the measuring stick, and they want to see if Semelsberger can get past him.
I believe he can. Semelsberger's good at picking off aggressive attackers with counters, he's gotten up from under more credentialed wrestlers than Morono, and he's got a definitive power and reach advantage. Matt Semelsberger gets a TKO.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Drew Dober (24-11 (1)) vs Rafael Alves (20-10)
This should really be the featured prelim. Hell, this should be a co-main event on a fight night. Drew Dober is one of the UFC's best bout machines, an all-around talent who came out of an alternate universe where Urijah Faber reigned supreme and Team Alpha Male ran the world: He wrestleboxes, he has an immaculate jawline, and going by his instagram, he never, ever wears a shirt.
Rafael Alves is an interesting case. He's a black belt in jiu-jitsu, he's won a score of regional Muay Thai titles, he entered the UFC on a five-fight win streak thanks to his versatility as both a striker and a grappler, and he gave possible-top-guy Damir Ismagulov a hell of a fight in his ultimately unsuccessful debut and followed it by trashing Marc Diakiese so hard it turned him into a wrestler. These things are impressive! But people don't really remember him for them. They remember Rafael Alves for
a) making a ring doctor very confused by picking him up out of victorious joy, and
b) loving up his UFC debut and nearly getting fired before he could have a fight by missing weight by 11.5 pounds, at the time the largest miss in UFC history, thanks to tainted fish.
It's been a tough time for Alves. I suspect this fight might be even tougher. I think Dober's a bit too orthodox and defensively sound to fall into the traps Alves leaves, and he'll be thumping him with punches the entire time he's trying to lure him into them. Drew Dober by decision.
HEAVYWEIGHT: Don'Tale Mayes (9-4) vs Hamdy Abdelwahab (3-0)
It's last-minute heavyweight time, baby. Don'Tale Mayes is a 6'6" judoka who had the misfortune of making his UFC debut against an unknown dude named Ciryl Gane. He's big, he's fast, but he's not great at translating his strength into direct threat--he's good at chucking people to the ground but not holding or controlling them long enough to secure submissions, and his ground and pound is more focused on chipping people away than putting them out. He was going to face big brawler Justin Tafa, but thanks to an injury his last-minute replacement is UFC debutant Hamdy "The Hammer" Abdelwahab, an Egyptian wrestler who made it to the Olympics in 2016 and lasted exactly one match. Hamdy only turned pro this year, and he's 3-0 after just seven months, but that's also a 3-0 that includes victories over 3 3-3 career middleweight and 0-0 dude Hamdy had, in fact, already knocked out in a bareknuckle fight the previous year. He is, unsurprisingly, a wrestler. He wrestles.
So it's a rookie wrestler fighting a much larger, much more experienced grappler who also has an 8-inch reach advantage and he's doing it with about ten days to prepare.
Don'Tale Mayes by TKO.
LIGHTWEIGHT: Drakkar Klose (12-2-1) vs Rafa Garcia (14-2)
These two fought right next to each other at Luque/Muhammad 2 back in April. At the time, I said two things of note:
Past Carl posted:
Every one of his three UFC fights has been tough, gritty and competitive, but Garcia's sprinting style cost him in cardio and ultimately saw him get outworked in the first two. He hits hard and he's aggressive, especially with back-take attempts, but tends to fade as his fights go on.
Past Carl posted:
Klose is entering his fifth year in the UFC at 11-2-1 after having missed two years of fighting thanks to a mixture of the pandemic and a deeply stupid incident where Jeremy Stephens shoved him so hard at a weigh-in it gave him a neck injury, which was somehow spun as Klose being a coward, because MMA is loving stupid.
Drakkar Klose by decision.
WELTERWEIGHT: Michael Morales (13-0) vs Adam Fugitt (8-2)
This, with respect to Adam Fugitt, seems like a sacrifice. Michael Morales is someone the UFC would love to get behind: An undefeated Ecuadorian champion with a willingness to discard his grappling advantages in favor of getting into wild brawls because he's good enough at them to win anyway. He knocked out the legitimately tough Trevin Giles in his debut, and the UFC clearly wanted to bring him up gently, as he was matched with perennial gatekeeper Ramiz Brahimaj before Razmis broke his poo poo and pulled out. And thus, on one week's notice, we have X-1 champion Adam Fugitt, a regional fighter with a decent jab who just two fights ago was getting nearly knocked out by 3-3 guys and has only had one MMA bout in nearly three years.
Sorry, buddy. I hope they give you a real nice low-card fight as a thank-you next time. Michael Morales by TKO.
WOMEN'S FLYWEIGHT: Joselyne Edwards (11-4) vs Ji Yeon Kim (9-5-2)
I really hate how frequently I find myself writing "oh, it's housecleaning fight time again" and realize I'm writing about one of if not the only women's fights on a given card. Ji Yeon Kim is a fun if sometimes sloppy brawler who just hasn't had much luck in the UFC. She fought Alexa Grasso, made a good accounting for herself but was outstruck by the superior boxer. She went toe to toe with new superstar Molly McCann, gave her a tough fight, and lost a close decision. So she adjusted and promptly beat the crap out of Priscilla Cachoeira, outstruck her by large margins in every single round, and, somehow, STILL lost a unanimous decision. It wouldn't be out of the question for Kim to be 11-3-2 and on a two-fight winning streak right now, and instead she's 1 for her last 5 and probably getting cut if she loses again.
And she got unlucky again, because after spending two months preparing for Mariya Agapova, an underpowered flyweight grappling specialist, she on two weeks' notice had her opponent changed to Joselyne Edwards, a volume-striking specialist who just won a fight at loving featherweight. So now she has to contend with a bigger, tougher challenger whose strengths match her own.
It's not fair, and I don't think it'll go well for her. Joselyne Edwards wins a decision and Ji Yeon Kim gets busted back down to the regionals. Life is not fair.
LIGHT-HEAVYWEIGHT: Nicolae Negumereanu (12-1) vs Ihor Potieria (20-2)
This is not a sentence I often say: I am unironically looking forward to this light-heavyweight fight. Nick Negumereanu impressed me against Kennedy Nzechukwu earlier this year--he was tough as nails, showed remarkable recovery after getting blitzed by a big puncher, and most importantly, he wrestled enough to make a drunken Vegas crowd who was there to see Jorge Masvidal upset, which at this point in our sport is basically political praxis. Ihor Potieria is the kind of fighter who once upon a time would've been picked up on his own merits but now he's a Contender Series baby because that and willingness to be late COVID replacements are the only talent scouting the UFC does anymore. He's a regional champion with some good straight punches and some quick reactions from his guard, but in fairness, it's easier to look good when you're 17 fights deep into your career and fighting 0-4 welterweights, because regional MMA is fake.
Nicolae Negumereanu gets a decision. Potieria has some potential, but he hasn't been tested yet and I think Negumereanu is too big a first step.
WELTERWEIGHT: Orion Cosce (7-1) vs Blood Diamond (3-1)
Back in February, City Kickboxing fielded Mike "Blood Diamond" Mathetha on the undercard of their star Israel Adesanya's rematch with Robert Whittaker. They hyped the absolute poo poo out of Blood Diamond, citing him as a striker of superlative ability and an MMA prodigy who was going to be a champion one day. This seemed really, really weird for a 33 year-old with three fights under his belt, and rather than a gimme the UFC threw him against the legitimately talented Jeremiah Wells, who crushed and strangled him in one round. This was on account of a replacement: Their initially intended opponent was tonight's draw, Orion Cosce. Who is...also actually a pretty decent grappler who shouldn't really have any problem ragdolling Mathetha and choking him out.
The UFC does not care about Blood Diamond. Orion Cosce by submission.
Prelims begin half an hour from this post.
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Jul 30, 2022 22:31
in Hamdy
